Just before sundown, the Marines hold a memorial for Horsehead in their camp. About fifteen of them gather in the grass, next to an M-4 rifle planted upright in the dirt with a helmet on it. It's drizzling in a gray, humid twilight. One of them reads a brief eulogy.
Then they put their hands together, and their voices scream in unison as they chant the First Recon cheer in Horsehead's memory: "Kill!"
By early morning on April 8, Army and Marine armored units have maneuvered into Baghdad's suburbs to the west, south and east. Under a ceaseless American artillery and aerial bombardment, they are getting ready for the final assault into the city center, set to begin after dark. Maj. Gen. Mattis is deeply concerned about the lack of American forces to the north of Baghdad. With his Marines oriented toward the center of the city, their northern flanks are exposed. His fear is that Iraqi Republican Guard units may be massing for a counterattack in a town called Baqubah, fifty kilometers north of Baghdad, getting ready to roll down and hit the Marines' northern flanks.
The problem is, Mattis doesn't know what the Iraqis are doing north of Baghdad. For the past thirty-six hours, a low cover of dust and rain clouds has hampered American surveillance efforts. The farthest Marine checkpoint north of Baghdad sits about ten kilometers outside the city on the road to Baqubah. Marines have dubbed the checkpoint the "magic line." Every time they've sent units to probe above the magic line in the past few days, the Marines have been hit by heavy fire. Recently, a platoon of about forty-five Iraqis attacked the Marine checkpoint and were repulsed after a short gun battle. After that, Iraqis tried to drive a car bomb into the checkpoint. It seems the Iraqis are up to something above the magic line, though it's uncertain exactly what it might be.
The weakness in the Marines' northern flanks gives Lt. Col. Ferrando his opening to get First Recon back into the game. After consulting with Mattis, Ferrando has volunteered to take First Recon north of the magic line, assault through the enemy ambushes and push on to Baqubah.
If the worst-case fears of Mattis are true, the Marines in First Recon will be confronting several thousand Iraqis in tanks. Baqubah is home to a Republican Division with a strength, on paper at least, of 20,000 soldiers equipped with 600 armored vehicles. Mattis knows that if the Iraqis come down in tanks, First Recon will be unable to stop them, but as he later tells me, "I knew that at least the Marines could slow them down for a few hours."
Even in the best-case scenario—if the Iraqi tanks aren't active—First Recon will be dashing through forty kilometers of known ambush positions. They will be the only Americans operating in the region, and by the time they reach Baqubah, they will have gone beyond the range of Marine artillery.
When Fick briefs his men on the mission early in the afternoon of the eighth, he tells them, "Once again, we will be at the absolute tippity-tip of the spear, going into the unknown. As soon as we step off, be prepared to engage and destroy targets of opportunity."
First Recon assembles a mixed force for the mission. Some 120 Marines in its best-equipped platoons will be joined by the ninety reservist Marines in Delta Company In addition, First Recon will be accompanied by an LAR unit of some 100 Marines in twenty-four vehicles. This unit's call sign is "War Pig."
Even though it's clear to the Marines that on this mission they might be serving more or less as human speed bumps—to slow down a much larger Iraqi advance—the men are quietly excited. After a couple of days of rest, most are sick of being in the camp. It's a hot, muggy afternoon, nearly 100 degrees in the shade. Flies breeding in Marine latrine trenches inside the camp, as well as on the dead livestock and human corpses outside the perimeter, infest the air. Several Marines in the platoon are suffering from the fever and dysentery that has plagued the unit since leaving Nasiriyah. But spirits are high as they load their vehicles. "I'm scared as fuck," Lilley tells me. "But I started getting anxious here in this camp. It's weird. I feel better knowing we're going to go shoot things again and fuck shit up again."
"Fuck, yeah!" Person says. "It beats sitting around doing nothing while everybody else gets to have fun attacking Baghdad."
One thing the Marine Corps can bank on is the low tolerance for boredom among American youth. They need constant stimulation, more than late-night bull sessions, ravioli fiestas and Colbert's now shredded, dogeared copy of ]uggs can provide. They need more war.
Colbert's Humvee is ordered into the lead of First Recon's convoy of about fifty vehicles as we leave the camp near five p.m. on April 8. Colbert stares out his window at the fading light, then mumbles something I can't quite make out. I ask him to repeat it. "It was nothing," he says. "I was just thinking about Horsehead. He was one hell of a man. Takes shrapnel to the head and winks out."
We enter the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, an industrial district of factories and warehouses. The streets are filled with newly liberated Iraqis in the throes of celebration. Though the city center will not fall for another twenty-four hours, freedom fills the air, along with the stench of rotting corpses, uncollected garbage and overflowing sewers. Trash piles and pools of fetid water line the edges of the road. Old women in black kneel in the puddles, gathering in jugs water that their families will boil and drink later.
Smoke pours from bombed, burning buildings on both sides of the road. Ashes fall like snowflakes. Iraqis stream through the haze, hauling random looted goods—ceiling fans, pieces of machinery, fluorescent lights, mismatched filing-cabinet drawers. As we pass by, the looters wave and give us the thumbs-up—thanking the Marines for making all this possible. Some stand in clusters, chanting the words everyone in Iraq now uses to hail the American liberators, "Bush! Bush! Bush!"
The bedlam continues for about ten kilometers. Explosions from the American assault now under way in the city center boom steadily. Kids crawl around twisted, blown-up Iraqi tanks by the road, playing on them or gathering scrap.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of American military vehicles stream past us going south. First Recon's convoy is about the only unit headed north.
We roll into open mudflats and link up with the twenty-four LAVs of First LAR Battalion's Charlie Company, call sign War Pig. With their eight wheels and upside-down bathtub shape, LAVs are among the strangest-looking war machines in the American arsenal. Designed to swim on the surface of the ocean as well as cruise on land, they have small propellers protruding from their rears, punctuating the oddness of their appearance. Because of their advanced optics and the devastating firepower, derived from the Bushmaster rapid-fire cannon each has mounted on its turret, Iraqis have nicknamed LAVs "the Great Destroyers."
For the Marines in First Recon, this is the first time they've started a mission with an armored escort. "Damn! That's fucking awesome," Person says. "We've got the Great Destroyers with us."
"No, the escort is not 'awesome,'" Colbert says. "This just tells us how bad they're expecting this to be."
As we pull out, following War Pig toward the magic line, Colbert's mood shifts from darkly brooding to grimly cheerful. "Once more into the great good night," he says in a mock stage voice, then quotes a line from Julius Caesar. "Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."
Hunched over the wheel, his helmet weighted down with his NVGs, Person says, "Man, when I get home, I'm gonna eat the fuck out of my girlfriend's pussy."
"Enemy contact," Colbert says, passing on word from radio. "LAVs report enemy contact ahead."
Just after darkness falls, War Pig's lead LAV reaches the magic line and the Marine checkpoint, where coils of concertina wire block the narrow, asphalt highway. War Pig's twenty-four LAVs are spaced about fifty meters apart in a single-file line stretching for more than a kilometer. Colbert's Humvee is directly behind the rear LAV, with First Recon's vehicles stretched behind his in a line that extends for another two kilometers.
Minutes after the guards at the checkpoint pull the concertina wire aside to let the convoy through, a white pickup truck speeds toward the lead LAV in War Pig. Its crew observes the truck through thermal nightscopes as it comes to within a couple hundred meters of them, executes a screeching 180-degree turn and hauls ass north. Iraqis in the back of the truck open up on the LAVs with AKs. It's nothing but harassing fire. The Marines guess the truck is acting as a "rabbit vehicle," trying to entice them into a chase and, they expect, an ambush.
The LAVs hesitate to cross the magic line. According to War Pig's executive officer, twenty-seven-year-old First Lieutenant William Wennberg, thus far in the war when working with other units they've occasionally had to go through red tape in order to get cleared hot to engage enemy forces. They've never worked with First Recon's Ferrando before, whom they refer to by his call sign, Godfather, and are uncertain how he will respond to the appearance of the rabbit vehicle shooting at them on the road.
When War Pig contacts Godfather and tells him about the harassing fire, he immediately clears them hot to pursue. "Godfather was awesome," Wennberg later says. "Some commanders get so caught up worrying about the politics of being too aggressive—destroying too much property, hurting innocent civilians—that they put your own forces at risk. Godfather told us to do what we needed to do, and it was good to go."
The LAVs lunge across the magic line in pursuit. Colbert's vehicle follows directly behind the rear LAV, as reports flow over the radio of the initial enemy contact. Everyone is quiet, waiting for the ambush. It's so dark inside Colbert's Humvee I can barely see my hands. I can't see the LAV through the front windshield ahead of us. I can't see what's out my window to the right, other than dim outlines of farm huts along the road in the flat landscape. A strong wind is starting to whip against the side of the vehicle. Above it, all I hear is the rumbling of the Humvee's diesel.
Colbert calls out to Hasser, who stands in the turret wearing NVGs. "See anything, Walt?"
"Nope," he shouts down.
"Look alert!" Colbert shouts, his voice cracking slightly.
Sitting to my left, Trombley says, his voice barely audible, "I hope I get to use her tonight." He's referring to his SAW machine gun. Though I can't see him, I can picture him caressing the top of his SAW as he sometimes does during tender moments before a firefight.
We drive this way for about ten minutes.
Then, after proceeding five kilometers north of the magic line, machine guns, rockets and mortars flash ahead of us in the darkness. The enemy has opened fire on the LAVs in front of us. Now I can see their outlines in the strobe-light effect of bombs and tracers going off around them. The blasts sound like hammers beating on the sides of Colbert's Humvee.
In the first moments, enemy ambushers who are entrenched alongside the road launch approximately forty RPGs at War Pig's column. In Wennberg's LAV, shrapnel from the RPGs immediately shreds four of his vehicle's tires. He estimates about 120 Iraqis are attacking from the west. Their ambush was coordinated enough that they held their fire until all of the LAVs had rolled into their kill box. As the enemy fire from the west intensifies, more Iraqis dug in to the east start to open up. They "bracket" the convoy by dropping heavy 82mm mortars on both ends of it, north and south (where Colbert's Humvee is positioned). These Iraqis have apparently figured out that the LAVs use thermal sights, and many of them are concealed beneath blankets to minimize their heat signatures.
The convoy halts. Through the windshield in Colbert's vehicle we can see the outlines of the LAVs as bombs flash all around. The LAVs open up with everything they have. Their cannons stutter explosively, spewing out tracer lines like red ropes that lash the ground for hundreds of meters on either side of the convoy. Pom-poms of fire bounce up from their targets. Iraqi tracers stream in toward them. The opposing lines of tracer fire tangle around one other, making it look almost like the two sides are dueling each other with glow-in-the-dark Silly String.
"I have no targets, no targets," Colbert shouts. The fire just ahead of us makes a steady roar. We could be standing at the edge of Niagara Falls.
Hasser shouts down from the turret. "I don't see nothing!"
There's nothing close enough for the team to engage. We watch the gun battle go on in front of us several minutes. Then the Iraqi fire into the LAV column drops precipitously. A lone Iraqi machine gun continues to spit tracers toward the LAVs. A half dozen of them pour fire onto it, but every time it looks like they've silenced it, the enemy machine gun starts up again. This duel continues on and off for another five minutes.
In the relative quiet that follows, Colbert leans out his window, using his nightscope to observe a small hamlet of four to eight mud huts perhaps twenty-five meters to our immediate right. In the window of the closest hut there's an amber light from a lantern or a candle.
"There's nothing there," Colbert says after studying the hamlet for a long time. "Just civilians behind a wall in back."
"Small-arms fire to our rear," Person says, passing on a report from the radio.
Then we hear AKs—they make a sharper, more substantial cracking sound than Marine M-4s—directly behind our vehicle. Fick reports over the radio that enemy fire is coming directly in on his Humvee about 100 meters behind us. Several rounds snap close to his head.
Recon Marines behind us return fire. It's not heavy yet, just intermittent crackling, like branches snapping in the woods.
"I have no targets, no targets!" Colbert repeats.
All at once, Marines in vehicles far to the rear of Fick's seemingly open up with every weapon they possess. Their gunfire sounds like a torrential rain. It's Delta Company, the reservist Marines. They're blazing away with machine guns and Mark-19s.
"Jesus Christ," Colbert shouts, laughing. "Those guys are putting down FPF." FPF—or final protective fire, shooting every weapon you have—is what Marines are trained to do only as a last-ditch measure. "They must think they've got the Chinese coming at them across the frozen Chosin," Colbert says, referring to the epic Korean War battle.
The village to our immediate right now comes under heavy machine-gun and Mark-19 fire from the Marines in Delta. As dozens of their grenades bounce off the huts and flash, exploding just thirty meters from us, a few Marines in Bravo open up. They mistake the sparkling Mark-19 bursts for enemy muzzle flashes—a common problem.